Freedom Girls

Freedom Girls (Photoshopped Badly)

Military Magazine online reports

U.S. Patriot Bonds

Six-year-old Anastasia Richardson pleads for your support of our soldiers in the fight against terrorism.

Help Anastasia, cover girl for the Patriot Bonds, and the Freedom Girls promote U.S. Savings Bonds. Due to budget cuts, the Savings Bond Program no longer has a marketing department and the Freedom Girls are on a quest to promote U.S. Savings Bonds. They are challenging Americans to purchase U.S. Savings Bonds to support our soldiers fighting the war on terrorism and in memory of 9/11 victims.

Purchasing a savings bond will help our nation financially support the war on terrorism and help curb the financial burden taxpayers will incur. The program is the most cost effective way to borrow money. The current Treasury cost model shows that for every $1 billion borrowed throughout Series EE (Patriot Bonds) and Series I Savings Bonds, $17 million is saved in comparison to cost associated with marketable securities.

Anastasiaís grandmother, Randi Johnson Dale, posed as a child model back in 1944 for a Popular Photography magazine cover promoting War Bonds. Now Randi, along with her daughter Susan, and granddaughter Anastasia, have appeared at Oklahoma county fairs and on street corners in Tulsa to encourage people to buy Savings Bonds.

Meanwhile The Guardian has excerpts from the Riverbend blog now a book.

Riverbend, 'Girl Blog from Iraq' as she dubs herself, was a computer programmer before the war - not any more. In her diary of the occupation, she describes the new, confined way of life, especially for women, amid the mayhem

Thursday, August 28 2003

Yesterday, I read how it was going to take up to $90bn to rebuild Iraq. Bremer [the former head of the US Occupation Authority] was shooting out numbers about how much it was going to cost to replace buildings and bridges and electricity, etc.

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad, well-known for building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who'll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the south-east end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn't too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward - $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labour, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let's pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let's pretend he hasn't been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let's pretend he didn't work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf war. Let's pretend he's wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated - let's pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let's just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to a US company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around - brace yourselves - $50,000,000!!

Something you should know about Iraq: we have over 130,000 engineers. More than half of these engineers are structural engineers and architects.

Guess where all those Patriot bonds are going Freedomgirls?